Leigh Strimbeck: Artistic Advisor and co-Founder of WAM Theatre
Leigh’s WAM Theatre credits include playing the role of ‘Joan’ in ‘Melancholy Play’ by Sarah Ruhl (beneficiary: Women’s Fund of Western MA) and directing ‘Mirror, Mirror’ in ‘A WAM Welcome’ (beneficiary: Women for Women International). Leigh is an actor, director, writer and acting teacher. Her college education included two years at Bennington College and two years at New York University, where she graduated with a BFA in Dance/Drama. Most recently, Leigh played ‘Florence Dobbe’ in the film Love Orchard, directed by Farhad Mann starring Kristanna Loken & Bruce Dern. She also played ‘Clare’ in ‘Kingdom of the Shore’ written by Terence Lamude and directed by Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, NY.
Her teaching began in New York City 30 years ago at the Actors and Directors Lab, and she has taught almost continuously since then. Later, she moved to Sweden where she learned the language, taught theater, and toured with a children’s theater company for a year. When she returned to the US she joined the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE) in Bloomsburg, PA, where she remains an Associate Member. There she continued to teach, perform and began directing. Plays she directed at BTE include: ‘Fools Rush In, ‘Voice of the Prairie, ‘Sea Marks’, ‘The Nest’, ‘Daytrips’, ‘The Baltimore Waltz’ and ‘Death of a Salesman’.
During her twelve years with BTE she acted in dozens of plays and served as Ensemble Director for three years. She was a site reporter for the National Endowment for the Arts for five years, and spent three years on the professional theatre companies panel. She traveled with BTE during a USIA tour of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia. The following year she returned to Zimbabwe for five weeks to adjudicate the National Theater Organization of Zimbabwe’s Theatre festival and to teach workshops.
Other plays directed at various regional theaters include ‘Children of a Lesser God’, ‘On the Verge’, ‘Tonight We Improvise’, ‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’ and ‘Private Eyes’. She co-wrote and directed ‘Berwick’, ‘America’ and ‘This House Builded’, both history plays commissioned by their communities. One man shows: ‘Here be Dragons’, co-written with Paul Outlaw; ‘Heavy Mettle’ and “Working Class’, both written and performed by Richard Hoehler.
Leigh also works with the New York State Defender’s Institute as a communications coach for their annual conferences and was an adjunct professor at SUNY Albany for 11 years.
Currently Leigh works as an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York where she has created and directed a work about young women, body image, and the pressure to be perfect called ‘Mirror, Mirror’. In 2010 she worked on a new piece with the women of Russell Sage, ‘I’m Not a Feminist, But….’ a look at the past 50 years of feminism and why the majority of young women today don’t identify as feminists.